500 Startups Accelerator – VentureBeathttp://venturebeat.com
News About Tech, Money and InnovationSat, 10 Dec 2016 01:30:34 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.178053529Copyright 2016, VentureBeatVentureBeathttp://vbstatic.co/brand/img/logos/VB_Extended_Logo_40H.pnghttp://venturebeat.com
25040Venturebeat.com500 Startups opens applications for its seventh batch of companieshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/07/16/500-startups-7th-batch/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/16/500-startups-7th-batch/#respondTue, 16 Jul 2013 17:45:04 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=780011Investment fund/accelerator program 500 Startups has opened up applications for its next crop of tech startups, the group announced today.
]]>Investment fund/accelerator program 500 Startups has opened up applications for its next crop of tech startups, the group announced today.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based group invests between $25,000 to $250,000 in early-stage tech companies. Over the last year, its accelerator has attempted to diversify its portfolio of companies by encouraging more women and international founders to apply. This is likely part of the reason founding 500 Partner Dave McClure chose to Photoshop his face onto international spy James Bond (– along with the fact that this will be the group’s seventh batch of startups — aka “Batch 007” — to go through the program.)

That’s not to say women or international founders necessarily have an advantage. 500 Startups partner Christine Tsai told VentureBeat that the group will be looking for startups with a strong team and a clear revenue model above all. Specifically, the group is interested in companies focused on consumer & commerce, SMB / SaaS, family tech, education, marketing, video content & infrastructure, language / international, mobile, financial Services, and food tech. In terms of geography, the group is interested in startups from the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Eastern/Western Europe.

“Even though we’re doing an application-only process for applying to Batch [00]7, we still very much rely on [the 500 Startup] Partners — especially our international Partners,” Tsai said. “Having that personal connection is really important making a decision .” That makes sense considering that the group previously used a referral-only method for choosing companies in the program.

500 Startups expects to admit about 30 companies into its seventh batch. Application submissions are open beginning today through Aug. 16. Final decisions of companies selected for the seventh batch is tentatively scheduled for early September, while the accelerator program itself will begin in October.

Founders looking for a better idea of what kind of companies 500 Startups is looking for can always check out the previous batch, which is holding an official demo day July 24. And while you probably won’t be able to get into that event, you can experience it vicariously through VentureBeat’s coverage.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/16/500-startups-7th-batch/feed/0780011500 Startups opens applications for its seventh batch of companies500 Startups Demo Day round 1: Disrupting babies, Brazil, and billinghttp://venturebeat.com/2013/02/06/500-startups-demo-day-round-1-disrupting-babies-brazil-billing/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/06/500-startups-demo-day-round-1-disrupting-babies-brazil-billing/#respondWed, 06 Feb 2013 22:42:00 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=617631Here is a look at the first round of startups to present at 500 Startups Demo Day in Mountain View.
]]>The 15 startups to present in the first round of 500 Startups Demo Day are taking on a wide range of industries and markets. The founders hail from America, Europe, India, and Latin America, and they are developing innovative ideas about e-commerce, marketing, payments and more. Check the companies out below.

CompStak says it creates transparency in commercial real estate by crowdsourcing information that is often hard to find, difficult to compile, or not unavailable. It sells the data to brokers, firms, and large real estate property owners. It has made a significant dent in the New York market and recently launched in San Francisco. Founder Michael Mandel is a former a real estate broker. He said half a trillion dollars in commercial real estate transactions happens each year, and CompStak helps them make these deals. It has raised a over $1 million so far and is raising more to promote growth. The headquarters is in New York.

Waygo powers an instant visual translation for smart phones. Founder Ryan Rogowski visited China and struggled with the language barrier. Eating kung pao chicken every day because he couldn’t figure out how to order anything else inspired him to build a simple translation service. Waygo translates text simply by hovering your smartphone camera over the words. The service costs $14.99 for unlimited translations per language.

Chewse is a B2B marketplace for organizations spending thousands of dollars on corporate catering. The platform makes it easier to order food easily. In the two test territories, the startup has already fed 20,000 meals to big customers, including Wells Fargo, the University of Southern California, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Founder Tracy Lawrence said these companies spend $30,000 a year on Chewse just to feed their people, and it has a waiting list of 700 companies. It’s in Santa Monica, Calif..

GazeMetrix helps brands know when their pictures appear in social media. The technology looks inside photos on social media sites to identify brand logos. Founder Deobrat Singh said people are “throwing money” at gazeMetrix because social media is increasingly focused on pictures, but brands don’t know to access or measure this visual content. Singh claims the technology can tell when images are going viral before they do so. GazeMetrix already has more than 40 clients, including Yoplait, Nike, Svedka, Coca-Cola, and Under Armour. The founders come from Delhi, India.

BabyList is a baby registry that helps new parents find, share, and buy the things they need for their babies. Founder and CEO Natalie Gordon is from San Francisco. When she was pregnant two years ago, she created multiple baby registries because she couldn’t find everything she needed from just one store, nor could she ask for things she actually needed, like help preparing meals. Gordon formerly worked as a developer at Amazon and immediately applied her coding skills to the problem. She launched Babylist two weeks before her son was born. Baby “stuff” is a huge industry, and Gordon said she is revolutionizing “baby e-commerce.” Last year, $2.3 million in gifts went through the site.

Founder Harald Trautsch built everbill to provide an easy way to issue invoices and estimates. It is “the last line of communication” between business, customers, and accountants. The B2B is working with large banks, SMBS, and telecom companies, including T Mobile. The founders are from Vienna.

Instamojo makes “selling online as easy as sharing.” The technology enables the sale of digital goods instantly — without requiring complex forms, time-consuming steps, or coding skills — by copying and pasting a link. Founder Sampad Swain is from Mumbai, India, where he previously started and sold a successful company.

femeninas is a social engagement platform for women and fashion in Spanish. Founder Ricardo Lerch comes from Buenos Aires and started the company with his wife. Lerch said onstage that there are 200 million Spanish-speaking women, and they are spending massive amounts of money on fashion and beauty because they “care a lot about their looks.” Lerch and McClure both are excited about opportunities in the Spanish-speaking market.

iDreamBooks is a trusted source of book recommendations, like RottenTomatoes for books. The company is from Canada and India. Founder Rahul Simha is a bookworm and wanted to build a universal score for books. He said the Amazon scores are becoming increasingly diluted and positive reviews are for sale. iDreamBooks aggregates professional and critical reviews, rates it as positive or negative, and generates a “snippet.” Read more on VentureBeat.

Markerly gives publishers and advertisers the access to data analytics about ‘micro content.’ In the nine weeks since launching, it has looked at the activities of 9 million users across its network. The technology sheds light on the “dark web.” It tells publishers what users are doing once they get to a site, based on small actions like copying and pasting. The team is from Washington, DC. Founder Sarah Ware said these “micro data points” provide the greatest insight into user behavior and can optimize their marketing.

Brazilian startup Qual Canal tracks conversations about TV shows and ads in social media. Founder Andre Terra said Brazil has 200 million addicted TV viewers and is the second largest social media user base in the world. People talk a lot about TV in Brazil, and Qual Canal captures (and sells) this data to broadcasters, brands, and agencies.

TouristEye is a web and mobile travel guide that helps you discover, collect, and plan travel experiences for your trips and getaways. Founder Ariel Camus said online travel guides suck, and they seek to do this by making it more personal. It is based in Madrid.

Hunie is a community that helps designers get constructive and honest peer-to-peer critiques. Founder Damiam Madray said these “skinny jean-wearing, tea-sipping geniuses” are in high demand but are hard to find. There are currently 365,000 job ads for designers. Hunie seeks to bring designers together to create more designers, because that is what startups need.

Curious Hat is building a “mobile playground for a curious generation.” The founders, Luca Prasso and Erwan Maigret, spent 20 years working at DreamWorks. Prasso’s son inspired him to create an online environment that creates “new types of real-world interactions” between parents and children.

Dealflicks like Priceline for movie tickets. This Oakland, Calif., company offers movie tickets and concessions for up to 60 percent off to get butts in movie theater seats. Founder Sean Wycliffe dropped out of college to live a party-boy lifestyle. After running out of money, he returned to college and began seeing a lot of movies in theaters. He noticed how many empty seats there were in the theaters and recruited two cofounders to build Dealflicks.

Startup incubator 500 Startups announced its fifth batch of companies today, with over half coming from international markets.

As VentureBeat has previously reported, 500 Startups is an early-stage seed fund and incubator program that’s become a brand name over the last few years. The group invests $25,000 to $250,000 in primarily consumer and small-to-medium-sized Internet startups as well as startups related to web infrastructure services. This batch of companies is the first that included 500 Startups’ new application process through AngelList. (Previously, 500 Startups was invite/recommendation only).

“The (application) process worked really well for us, and we plan to keep working with AngelList for future batches,” the group said in a statement. “We received hundreds of applications and ended up selecting eight companies.”

500 Startups emphasized how diverse its latest batch is, noting that 21 percent of the 33 companies it chose have at least one female founder, and 57 percent are based outside of the U.S.

We’ve listed all 33 of the new 500 Startups companies below, along with a brief description of each. The group of founders from the batch also created a short video about “Sh*t 500 Founders Say,” which is also embedded below.

BabyList – A baby registry that works like Pinterest. Put anything on the web onto your baby registry. Makes pregnancy less overwhelming and more fun.

We’ve seen a bunch of incubators emerge in the last few years, but McClure’s incubator stands out with its focus on design, distribution, and the lean startup methodology.

Of the 12 incubated startups that we saw today, three of them were big standouts:

Visual.ly — Visual.ly gives publishers and advertisers a way to quickly get a hold of data for infographics — and contract the work out to designers. Most major publications like the Huffington Post and Gawker regularly publish infographics as a way to get a reader’s attention. Publishers pay a recurring subscription fee to Visual.ly to get a hold of data and get access to analysts and designers to create an infographic custom suited for their needs. The team is from Mint.com’s award-winning blog,which gets 1 million page-views every day.

YongoPal — YongoPal is basically a photo-sharing application that is designed to inspire communication between two individuals in completely different companies. The service was originally launched to connect Korean students with English-speaking students to help the Korean students learn English. The mobile app gives individuals a prompt — like “What are you haivng for dinner?” — and asks them to take a photo to start a conversation. The original application picked up 23,500 downloads from university students in 3 months without promotion.

Baydin — Offers tools to manage your inbox. Some of those tools make answering emails a little easier, for example by scheduling a time to re-receive an email that you can’t deal with at the moment. More ambitously, it has also created a gaming framework around email, to keep you motivated to plow through your inbox and not spend too much time on any individual message.

Outside of our favorites, there were a number of companies pitching products that sounded promising and that we might actually use. Here are short descriptions of the other demonstrators:

InternMatch — InternMatch aims to simplify the internship-seeking process. There are basic search options for both students looking for internships and companies looking for interns, as well as tools like resume guides to help students app. Companies pay to use the service, but there’s a money-back guarantee if they don’t find someone who meets their needs.

Spoondate — Helps people get together for meals. Users announce the kind of food they’re craving, then they can connect for one-on-one or group gatherings. The site will also offer ways for restaurants to reach out to potential customers. Apparently the company started out as a dating site, but it now aims to be a broader social service, especially for professional women.

Punchd — Punchd lets businesses transplant their “buy 10 get one free” cards onto the smartphones of customers. The businesses that sign up with Punchd also get access to analytics that describe what kind of customers they have. Any business can sign up for the service through the web, but they still have to be manually approved for now. 60 companies have signed up for the service and are on a wait list now. The company launched its service at three college campuses and saw more than 7,000 “punches” on those virtual buy-ten-get-one-free cards.

Rewardli — Rewardli brings small businesses together to make large group purchases so they can take advantage of group buying discounts. That can include services like Expedia — where companies can get discounts for buying plane tickets in bulk. Rewardli tacks onto a web browser to keep track of how much money a company saved by purchasing with a group discount. The app also indicates how much more money a company could have saved by adding additional companies to the buying pool — and offers a suggestion to invite moe people. The company has raised $100,000 from 500 Startups and Real Ventures.

Wednesdays — Wednesdays is an online application that handles all the nitty-gritty details to schedule business lunches. The app connects users with LinkedIn and Facebook connections to generate “groups” that companies can use to schedule tailored lunch meetings. That means scheduling a lunch meeting with specific roles — like sales associates or programmers — with other individuals. The back-end process is more similar to filling seats on an airplane because it fills up lunch meetings based on certain conditions rather than just haphazardly scheduling lunch meetings. The service automatically slaps those lunch meetings onto calendar programs.

Ninua — Ninua is a news-sharing application for Facebook that recommends stories based on three conditions: whether it’s mainstream, whether it’s niche and whether a user’s friends are reading it. That gives users the chance to automatically curate what kind of stories that appear in front of them based on their own interests and their friends’ interests. Ninua signs up blogs to help them pick up some additional publicity and find new readers based on the content they produce as well. The service already has 1.7 million active users, and it’s now launching a mobile application.

CrowdRally — CrowdRally connects to YouTube and other social media sites to show what a user’s friends are watching. It creates a queue of videos that friends have watched and lets users give suggestions about videos to watch. “Influencers” that can generate a lot of traffic for a video can sign up and share videos on the service as well — such as a movie trailer or a music video. They then get paid based on the number of views they bring to the video.

SpeakerGram — Has created a new way to manage speaking engagements. A hot company like Foursquare is bombarded with speaking requests for conferences and elsewhere (VentureBeat has done its share of bombarding), and most of that comes in the form of email. With SpeakerGram, companies can just add a “request to speak” button to their site, asking event organizers to provide relevant information. Then the potential speakers can just log in to the system and go through the requests in an organized way.

Motion Math — Creates educational games for tablets. The idea is to use tablets’ touch interface and accelerometer to make difficult concepts (like fractions, which were the subject of Motion Math’s first game) fun and visceral.

The 500 Startups Demo Day also included portfolio companies that weren’t part of the accelerator, but we’ve covered a number of those startups before. So instead of describing all of them, we’ll just write individual posts about companies that strike our fancy.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/06/500-startups-demo-day/feed/13253003The coolest companies from Dave McClure’s 500 StartupsDave McClure’s 500 Startups opens an incubatorhttp://venturebeat.com/2011/02/10/500-startups-accelerator/
http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/10/500-startups-accelerator/#commentsThu, 10 Feb 2011 17:00:11 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=242373Updated with the complete list of companies 500 Startups, the early-stage firm founded by iconoclastic investor Dave McClure, is getting into the startup incubation business with its new 500 Startups Accelerator. Incubators, where young companies receive office space, mentorship, and a little bit of funding, seems to be all the rage right now. But the […]
]]>Updated with the complete list of companies

500 Startups, the early-stage firm founded by iconoclastic investor Dave McClure, is getting into the startup incubation business with its new 500 Startups Accelerator.

“We’re out to hit singles and doubles,” McClure told me yesterday. “We’re not trying to hit a home run every time and striking out a lot.”

Hosting and mentoring startups seems like a natural extension of that philosophy. The 500 Startups Accelerator will place an emphasis on design, distribution, and on the “lean startup” methodology. It will include access to the firm’s network of more than 120 mentors. Ten to 15 of those mentors will be “mentors in residence” who work at the incubator’s Mountain View, Calif. office on a weekly basis.

McClure told me that he doesn’t think 500 Startups is necessarily a competitor to other programs like Y Combinator and TechStars, because he isn’t limiting himself to freshly-formed startups. So a company could start out at another incubator, then join the 500 Startups Accelerator afterwards. (There aren’t any YC or TechStars alums in the current batch, but McClure noted that the firm has invested in a number of graduates from both programs.)

Moving forward, McClure predicted that 500 Startups’ investments will probably be split 50-50 between accelerator companies and other seed investments. Companies in the accelerator will receive $25,000 to $100,000 in exchange for 5 percent of their equity, and the firm may follow on with future investments. (For more mature startups that have already raised funding, 500 Startups will just join the funding under the terms set by existing investors, McClure said.)